Writing When There's No Time to Write

Edgar Allan Poe wrote that a short story is a piece of fiction that can be read in one sitting--an unhelpfully vague definition, given the varying amounts of butt-glue human beings are apportioned.  (I suppose micro-fiction is for folks who really can't sit still.) 

I've also found that, for me, a short story is what gets written in one sitting.  I sit down and draft from start to finish.  The notion, or the opening image, or a line, or the controlling metaphor, or the ending might have been rolling around, inchoate, in my psyche for a while, but once I sit down, I have to write until it's done.  Otherwise, the mood, tone, everything shifts.  And once the trance of that "vivid and continuous dream," in John Gardner's words, is ruptured for me, alas, I lose interest.  (I know Gardner's talking about what we writers are supposed to create for readers, but it also works on the composition end, at least in the first draft stage.  At least for me.)  If I don't have time to write the whole first draft in one sitting, that story just doesn't happen.

Lately, though, life's been wild.  Working evenings and weekends on work-stuff (oh, those graduate applications!), it's been difficult to find two or three hours to rub together.  But the impulse to write doesn't care about my schedule; it won't shut up just for my convenience.  And something new and strange has been happening.

While I'm brushing my teeth or showering, stuff has been coming to me--just little bits, fragments:  the character's name, maybe, or what she did in college, or what someone said to her at work that day.  A possible title.  So I've begun keeping a notebook outside the bathroom door (the way paper gets wrinkly when it's exposed to moisture bugs me), and when I emerge with some new nugget, I jot it down.  Just three minutes, five minutes at a time. 

It's adding up.  Now I've got fourteen pages of little fragments, all toward the same story, and I'm really pleased and excited.   There's texture there, layers and resonances, that I might never have gotten if I'd drafted it all out on the day the first image occurred to me.  My brain keeps coming at it from different angles, adding things I wouldn't have thought of if I'd done my usual start-to-finish process.

In the past, I've tended to write short-shorts:  4 pages, 6 pages.  I've got a couple of 25-pagers--one's coming out soon from Texas Review--but honestly, they always feel labored when I reread them, and I always suspect myself of having written them just to prove I could:  that I could write real, fat, plot-driven stories like grown-ups do, instead of my compressed little allusive epiphanic nothings. 

Now something's coming together that feels both effortless and substantive.  Interesting.

I'm looking forward to making a nice, long, leisurely first-draft date with it--maybe after AWP?--and spending five hours or so romancing and getting to know it.  I hope I'm not jinxing anything by saying that I feel kind of sanguine. 

So if you find yourself with a crazy-busy job, or a toddler, or a blitzkrieg of responsibilities, don't despair.  Just put that notebook somewhere you can grab it easily.  Trust the process.  Let things accumulate.  When you finally get time to make that date, they'll be there.